The definition of "realm population" needs to be refreshed

The title "realm population" is completely misleading. Blizzard uses the mechanism of "total characters created" to calculate the population of a realm in World of Warcraft. My original realm - Agamaggan EU - died years ago. It wasn't that people would've migrated off. In fact, they just stopped playing their characters on that realm or completely quit the game. Using the guild-finder, you can observe hundreds of level 25 guilds with hundreds of members, causing this "medium" population-mark.

When a newbie chooses a realm to start his path in, the title "population" is completely misleading and causes him to lack most parts of the game due to:

Dead economy, auction houses are empty, nobody is using trade channel

No raid groups to current content

No social interactivity or friends to get to known with

Why does Blizzard do this? Isn't the satisfaction of every customer their top priority? No, simply not. What you don't know, doesn't hurt you. And then we all know what is the result of LFR-ish tools that you may join in from multiple realms.

Blizzard should:

Offer real-time population calculations based on recent logs

Force realm-merges to completely dead realms

Offer free migrations OFF the dead realms and shut them down permanently

Finally, I decided to add some pictures that were taken on this "medium-populated" realm of ours. It's your own judgement whether you find the title misleading or not.

Yes, I agree something needs to be done. The entire experience of the game can change based on being on high-pop realm compared to being on one as pictured with -50 online.

I appreciate that DG's and LFR etc can be done without leaving a city, but imagine the experience for a 'first time player' if they were to roll a horde on say EU-Silvermoon. The horde side is utterly dead, you'd have no-one to ask advice, nothing on the AH to buy. Anyone you did manage to get a few words out of would say 'this server is dead mate'.

Agreed, you're quite right on the subject at hand here.
However I feel some information is lacking.
At what time were the screenshots of /who taken?
Could you take them again at various times such as prime time and non prime time?

There's no point to keep dead servers like this around, or at the very least no reason to promote them as 'medium' populated realms.

OP is 1000% correct. The only solution is to merge low pop server. Bliz fully aware of the problem. By merging server, Bliz will not be able to milk $25 character transfer fee. Everyone in wow has more that one char. Stock holder will see closing down server as losing money on investment. That is why bliz comes up with bandage solution which is bs CRZ. Bliz only care about how much money sub fee player will to pay and extra cash from service like char transfer which are all automated. Only solution is to just quit. I love wow, but with all these BS bandage temporary solution Bliz put forth. I'll de-sub once my 1 yr contract expire. CRZ is totally BS. I'm on low server pop. All my friends quit. Before CRZ, low has it's advantages of able to farm rare mounts, pets, materials and etc. It's not bad enough that low pop has no economy. Bliz penalized low pop realm instead of merge server. The amazing excuse Bliz state : player will be upset if they have to choose different name, therefore realm can't be merge. So long WoW...

I don't know how accurate WowProgress is about the server populations, but looking at the bottom of the EU servers list, there are 2 servers with less than 200 on them, is that really accurate or just way out?

EU.Hakkar is showing only 119 players, that feels about the same as the horde side on my server, let alone the whole server...

EU.Hakkar is showing only 119 players, that feels about the same as the horde side on my server, let alone the whole server...

That one is different, it was caused by the introduction of italian realms. They should have turned Hakkar into an italian realm and offered free transfers for the non-italians instead of adding a new realm and giving every italian a free transfer to it.

I found that a good indicator for realmpopulation is wowprogress. It probably isn't amazingly accurate but it shows Agamaggan - EU as 828 'active' PvE players. That pretty much makes it one of the least played realms in the EU (definately no medium server).

Wowprogress definition:
* Population - amount of level 90 characters that meet any of the two conditions:
- The character is from a guild and the guild killed something in Tier 13 content
- The character killed something in Tier 13 content

(Tier 13 is DS btw. I assume they meant Tier 13+ including Tier 14 but then again I'm not sure.)

OP is 1000% correct. The only solution is to merge low pop server. Bliz fully aware of the problem. By merging server, Bliz will not be able to milk $25 character transfer fee. Everyone in wow has more that one char. Stock holder will see closing down server as losing money on investment. That is why bliz comes up with bandage solution which is bs CRZ. Bliz only care about how much money sub fee player will to pay and extra cash from service like char transfer which are all automated. Only solution is to just quit. I love wow, but with all these BS bandage temporary solution Bliz put forth. I'll de-sub once my 1 yr contract expire. CRZ is totally BS. I'm on low server pop. All my friends quit. Before CRZ, low has it's advantages of able to farm rare mounts, pets, materials and etc. It's not bad enough that low pop has no economy. Bliz penalized low pop realm instead of merge server. The amazing excuse Bliz state : player will be upset if they have to choose different name, therefore realm can't be merge. So long WoW...

This crossrealm crap is also destroying the social aspect of the game. But everytime I say they should make LFD/LFR realm only and just fix low populated realms by merging and free transfers instead people on the forums get pissed while it is Blizzard who is only looking for quick money and not a good game that will last for many years longer.

And yes the only thing you can do is to quit or deal with it and keep playing. Giving feedback on such issues doesn't help and you can wait for a very long time for things to change ;p.

---------- Post added 2013-02-20 at 03:54 PM ----------

Originally Posted by gend

Ya it is pretty ridiculous how those tags work.

I found that a good indicator for realmpopulation is wowprogress. It probably isn't amazingly accurate but it shows Agamaggan - EU as 828 'active' PvE players. That pretty much makes it one of the least played realms in the EU (definately no medium server).

Wowprogress definition:
* Population - amount of level 90 characters that meet any of the two conditions:
- The character is from a guild and the guild killed something in Tier 13 content
- The character killed something in Tier 13 content

(Tier 13 is DS btw. I assume they meant Tier 13+ including Tier 14 but then again I'm not sure.)

That's probably a better way but a new player will never do that. The only thing a new player sees is 'low' 'medium' or 'high' and then chooses one. I now always choose high populated servers for any game I start playing.

I found that a good indicator for realmpopulation is wowprogress. It probably isn't amazingly accurate but it shows Agamaggan - EU as 828 'active' PvE players. That pretty much makes it one of the least played realms in the EU (definately no medium server).

Wowprogress definition:
* Population - amount of level 90 characters that meet any of the two conditions:
- The character is from a guild and the guild killed something in Tier 13 content
- The character killed something in Tier 13 content

(Tier 13 is DS btw. I assume they meant Tier 13+ including Tier 14 but then again I'm not sure.)

That is still counting characters and not accounts though. If we are going to simply count characters, http://wow.realmpop.com/ is a better site to use, as it pulls data directly from the Blizzard API and counts all characters, not just ones who participate in PvE raid content or belong to guilds that do.

All this complaining is simply further proof that Blizzard could send each and every player a real-life wish-granting flying unicorn carrying a solid gold plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in hundred dollar bills, and someone would whine that Blizzard sucks for not letting them choose oatmeal raisin.

Originally Posted by DeadmanWalking

If your guild demands you slip into an elephants butt and force yourself out in a regurgation then you can't blame Blizzard for supplying the elephant.

Blizzard doesn't merge realms so you should reward them with 20e per char so they never ever merge realms.

Merging realms would create more problems than it fixes, at least short term. There are tons of threads explaining the specifics so I won't go into them. But I would much sooner expect Blizzard to make all character transfers free before I would expect them to consider permanently merging realms.

All this complaining is simply further proof that Blizzard could send each and every player a real-life wish-granting flying unicorn carrying a solid gold plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in hundred dollar bills, and someone would whine that Blizzard sucks for not letting them choose oatmeal raisin.

Originally Posted by DeadmanWalking

If your guild demands you slip into an elephants butt and force yourself out in a regurgation then you can't blame Blizzard for supplying the elephant.

That one is different, it was caused by the introduction of italian realms. They should have turned Hakkar into an italian realm and offered free transfers for the non-italians instead of adding a new realm and giving every italian a free transfer to it.

That one is no different at all.

Aggamagan and Spinebreaker were the two servers where the spanish community got together before spanish servers went up shortly before TBC.

Aggamagan never recovered from the free migrations(I had characteres there months after that).Its 99.99% the same situation.

That is still counting characters and not accounts though. If we are going to simply count characters, http://wow.realmpop.com/ is a better site to use, as it pulls data directly from the Blizzard API and counts all characters, not just ones who participate in PvE raid content or belong to guilds that do.

Server alliancehordetotal

Agamaggan PvP Normal English CET 14,65517,643 0.831 32,371

That is a medium server according to realmpop - figures taken 3 minutes ago